The core of the article focuses on a brief analysis of a select number of Okri’s 13 rhapsodies in prose, showing how each stoku serves to illustrate a poetically rendered moment of insight, a vision or a paradox.
A comparison between the conventions inherent in the ancient Japanese art of tanka or haiku (short poems), also known as waku and displaying the poet’s imaginative wit (derived from the Anglo-Saxon witan ), and those of Okri’s newer art form, the stoku, follows. This elliptical form to which Ben Okri gives the name stoku is, as he states in Tales of freedom, ‘an amalgam of short story and haiku’. This is followed by a brief digression to outline the paucity of critical reception of this prose anthology, followed by a focused discussion of the storytelling form, in general, and the stoku, in particular. The introduction is an attempt to show the interrelationship between poetry and thought, on the one hand, and poetic experience, creative consciousness and serendipity, on the other. As a sudden insight, serendipity becomes, in this Nigerian writer’s hands, a poetic device equivalent to illumination or an epiphanic moment.
It does this principally through an exploration of this new literary mode and its use of serendipity. This article illustrates the theme of the poetic in Ben Okri’s stokus from his Tales of freedom. This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution,Īnd reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. Promoting the poetic cause in Ben Okri’s stokus from Tales of freedom (2009) Gray, R.A., 2016, ‘Promoting the poetic cause in Ben Okri’s stokus from Tales of freedom (2009)’, Literator 37(1), a1233.
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